Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film

Author(s): Adam Lowenstein

Source: Representations, Vol. 110, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 105-128
Published by: University of California Press
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ADAM LOWENSTEIN

Living Dead:
Fearful Attractions of Film
Fear and film have always been intimate companions. One of
cinemas primal scenes testifies to this intimacy and originates from the
mediums very beginnings: the famous 1895 screening of Louis and Auguste
Lumires The Arrival of a Train at the Station (LArrive dun train en gare de la
Ciotat, 1895) at the Grand Caf in Paris. The spectators in the Grand Caf,
among cinemas very first public audiences, responded to the image of a train
pulling into a station with pure terror. The power of this new technology to
grant movement to photography was so overwhelming that viewers turned
and fled from the train as if it threatened to crush them. For this audience, the
cinematic image of the train became the train itselfsomething to fear.
At least thats how the story goes. The film historian Tom Gunning points
out how the oft-repeated accounts of this incident appear more mythological
than truthful after careful study of evidence from the period. Writing in
1989, Gunning observes how this primal scene at the cinema lives on nevertheless, how the terrorized spectator of the Grand Caf still stalks the
imagination of film theorists who envision audiences submitting passively to
an all-dominating apparatus, hypnotized and transfixed by its illusionist
power.1 Today, this situation in film studies has changed considerably, due
in no small part to Gunnings own pathbreaking scholarship.2 His description of early cinema (18951906) as dominated by an aesthetic he calls the
cinema of attractions has become perhaps the single most influential concept in film studies over the last twenty years.3
Gunnings definition of the cinema of attractions is worth quoting at
some length, as I will use it to anchor my own discussion of fear and film to
key debates within the discipline of cinema and media studies:
The cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectaclea unique event, whether
A B S T R A C T This essay analyzes the relationship between fear and film by exploring the theoretical
concept of attractions and its value for a historical understanding of three seminal American horror
films directed by George A. Romero: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Land of the Dead (2005), and Diary of
the Dead (2008). All three films belong to the same Living Dead series, so the essay focuses especially
on their shared temporal relations to historical trauma through issues of deferral, belatedness, and
retranscription. / REPRESENTATIONS 110. Spring 2010 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN
07346018, electronic ISSN 1533855X, pages 10528 All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.
ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/rep.2010.110.1.105.

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fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself. The attraction to be displayed

may also be of a cinematic nature, such as . . . trick films in which a cinematic manipulation (slow motion, reverse motion, substitution, multiple exposure) provides the
films novelty. Fictional situations tend to be restricted to gags, vaudeville numbers
or recreations of shocking or curious incidents (executions, current events). It is the
direct address of the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a
cinema showman, that defines this approach to filmmaking. Theatrical display dominates over narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe. The cinema
of attractions expends little energy creating characters with psychological motivations or individual personality. Making use of both fictional and non-fictional attractions, its energy moves outward towards an acknowledged spectator rather than
inward towards the character-based situations essential to classical narrative.4

This initial formulation of the cinema of attractions, revised and expanded by Gunning in a series of linked essays he began publishing in 1986,
already suggests a number of reasons why the concept has continued to resonate so powerfully with film scholars within and beyond the subfield of
early cinema. A cinema of attractions uncovers an alternative set of film aesthetics and film histories that had been relegated previously to the margins of
what was usually assumed to be central: films evolution as a narrative-based,
storytelling medium. Prior to the recognition of a cinema of attractions, film
historians routinely proceeded as if it were cinemas destiny to develop the
sort of narratives we now associate with the classical Hollywood stylethe
dominant form of commercial film style in the United States from roughly
1917 to the present, with remarkable worldwide influence.5 Classical Hollywood style emphasizes psychologically motivated, goal-oriented characters as
the active agents who move through cause-effect chains of events. These
events are based on a series of temporal deadlines that resolve with a strong
degree of closure by the time the film concludes.6 The result is a film style
where telling a story is the basic formal concern and conventions of realism arise from commitments to concealment of artifice, comprehensible
and unambiguous storytelling, and a fundamental emotional appeal that
transcends class and nation.7
If classical Hollywood style is posited as the norm, then filmmaking practices that deviate from it risk becoming seen as primitive (such as early cinema)
or excessive (such as genres where spectacle often seems to trump narrative,
including musicals and horror films). The cinema of attractions has come to
stand for an alternative tradition, one that embraces a set of practices and conventions different from those of classical Hollywood style. Through the lens of
a cinema of attractions, what once seemed primitive or excessive now
emerges as a tradition in its own right, worthy of engagement on its own terms.8
Gunning himself has always maintained that a cinema of attractions must be
understood as existing alongside and in dialogue with those narrative priorities
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at the heart of classical Hollywood style, rather than as a mode incommensurable with it or fundamentally opposed to it. According to Gunning, the fate
of the cinema of attractions after its dominance during the early cinema
period is not disappearance but relocation; it goes underground, both into
certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films, more evident in some genres . . . than in others. 9 If the entire notion of a cinema of
attractions springs from the primal encounteras mythically persistent as it is
historically inconsistentbetween fearsome film and fearful audiences, then
what does the horror film genre in particular have to tell us about the attractions of cinema? Is it possible that this genre, with its multiple and varied
investments in shocking, terrifying, disturbing, and haunting its viewers, has
more to teach us than perhaps any other about the fearful attractions of film?
This essay attempts to generate some provisional answers to these difficult
questions.
Much of my own previous research can be seen as responding to similar
questions. I have argued elsewhere that the modern horror film (post-1960),
in particular cases tied to specific national contexts, confronts viewers with
the traumatic legacies of events such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the
Vietnam War. I have contended that the allegorical method these horror
films employ to engage historical trauma results in a more confrontational
address of the spectator than is found in those contemporaneous art films
that are often more explicit in their references to traumatic historical events
(and always more critically praised). My ultimate goal was to trace a series of
allegorical moments in these horror films that enact a shocking collision
of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical
time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined.10
The concept of a cinema of attractions helped to inspire my formulation
of the allegorical moment in several ways. First, my sense of the horror
films direct, visceral address of the spectators body was influenced by the
aesthetic of attractions described by Gunning. Second, my claim that the
excess of the horror film could be construed as a strength rather than a
weakness when compared with more legitimate art films mirrored the
dynamics of Gunnings encounter between early cinema and classical Hollywood style. Finally, I wished to extend the logic of a cinema of attractions to
areas that seemed absent or marginalized in Gunnings model. For example,
Gunnings emphasis on the differences between early cinemas attractions
and classical Hollywood styles narrative-driven pleasures often constructs a
divide between the bodily, sensational aspects of cinematic spectatorship and
its more rational, cognitive dimensions focused on storytelling. Although
Gunning devotes considerable care and attention to reminding us that such
distinctions must not be perceived as absolute or noninteractive, his interest
in elucidating one set of terms rather than the other necessarily highlights
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attractions more so than narrative. What, then, do we make of the horror

films allegorical representation of historical trauma? Is it rooted in attractions, in the direct address of the spectator at the level of bodily sensation?
Or is it the product of cognitive processes such as memory and identification
upon which narrative depends? My notion of the allegorical moment in the
horror film points toward a both/and response to these questions, rather
than an either/or.11
In this essay, I wish to extend my investigation of historical trauma and
the horror film by revisiting the cinema of attractions, this time delving more
deeply into issues of temporality, particularly deferral, belatedness, and
retranscription. This emphasis on temporality aims to illuminate the nature
of cinemas fearful attractionsthe mediums ability to frighten us in ways
that are both visceral and cognitive, personal and historical. My case study
focuses on a landmark in the history of the modern horror film: writer/director George A. Romeros extraordinarily influential Living Dead series,
which began with Night of the Living Dead (1968) and now stands at five entries,
including the most recent installment Diary of the Dead (2008).12 Given my concerns with belated and retrospective temporalities, I will concentrate especially on the two most recent entries in a series that now spans forty years and
shows no signs of stopping.
Living in the Land of the Dead
Surely the distinction of most deferred film of 2005 belongs to
Land of the Dead, Romeros fourth Living Dead film. Land of the Dead appears
thirty-seven years after Night of the Living Dead, twenty-six years after Dawn of
the Dead (1979), and twenty years after Day of the Dead (1985). Of course, there
were persuasive commercial factors for why the time seemed right for producers to risk a new entry in a series whose most recent entry dates back two
decades; most prominent among these was the considerable financial success
of such recent Romero-inspired films as 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)
and the remake of Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004). Land of the Dead performed respectably at the box office but did not replicate the success of those
films. I would submit that one reason for this difference in popularity was not
the belatedness of Land of the Dead, but its timeliness.
Indeed, one of Land of the Deads most remarkable qualities is that its
belatedness is precisely what contributes to its unsettling historical timeliness.
It is this sense of temporality that makes Land of the Dead a more rewarding and
important work than those recent films indebted to Romero, but it is also what
makes Romeros film much more difficult, demanding, and confrontational
to watch, particularly within a contemporary American reception context. I
will attempt to uncover the functions of timeliness in Land of the Dead with the
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goal of reflecting upon how cinema represents trauma and inspires fear. In
short, I want to examine a deferred film to grapple with cinemas relation to
the complex temporalities of traumatemporalities that Sigmund Freud
famously characterized as nachtrglich, or deferred.13
Although Freuds concept of Nachtrglichkeit, or deferred action, was
never fully defined within his writings, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis note that the term crops up repeatedly and constantly . . . from
very early on and that it was indisputably looked upon by Freud as part of
his conceptual equipment. Laplanche and Pontalis define deferred action
as an idea frequently used by Freud in connection with his view of psychical
temporality and causality: experiences, impressions and memory-traces may
be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development. They may in that event be endowed not
only with a new meaning but also with psychical effectiveness.14 Freud
always conceived of the psyche as a stratified mechanism, where memories
are subject to rearrangement and retranscription according to shifts in
time and experience, but he usually reserves deferred action for experiences
impossible for the subject to integrate in a meaningful way at the time of
their occurrence.15 As Laplanche and Pontalis note, the traumatic event is
the epitome of such unassimilated experience.16
If a memory is deferred, or revised, or reimagined in possibly fantastic
ways commensurate with the affective rather than the veridical truth of traumatic experience, is this memory still true? Janet Walker offers the valuable
observation that when we enter the realm of what she calls the vicissitudes of
traumatic memory, dichotomies such as true/false, however tempting to
enlist in the face of circumstances often accompanied by dire personal and
political consequences, are simply not adequate to the complexity of the
problems that have surfaced.17 What we need instead is a more nuanced theoretical approach to traumatic memory that permits us to weigh concerns
such as truth and falsehood alongside questions of how exactly trauma and
memory interact, with particular sensitivity to the variety of possibilities with
which traumatic memory may manifest itself. I believe one promising avenue
of research into detailing these possibilities is to study how media deals with
the representation of traumatic events and to learn from these representations what the range of responses to trauma may look like. Such research
should not simply equate media representations (or our reactions to them)
with individual psychological mechanisms, but use the media representations as touchstones for generating questions that may or may not illuminate
certain psychological or social processes.
I believe that since the horror film is a genre built upon depicting frightening, often traumatic experiences yet rarely considered serious enough to portray traumatic history, its engagements with historical trauma are particularly
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valuable. The horror films allegorical moments serve to open up debates

about what exactly counts as a frightening representation of historical
trauma. Why do certain forms of art cinema and national cinema tend to
count when it comes to representing historical trauma while others do
not? Is there any relation between such distinctions and the demarcations
used to characterize certain forms of traumatic memory as more accurate
and true than others? I will now turn to Land of the Dead to expand our
sense of the potential intersections between deferred action and frightening
cinematic representation.
Near the beginning of Land of the Dead, we are introduced to a black gas
station owner whose uniform announces him as Big Daddy. This is all we
learn of his name, because he does not speakhe is a walking corpse, or
zombie, reanimated with millions of other recently deceased bodies when
the Earth falls prey to a mysterious plague that causes the dead to rise and
eat the living. From the outset, Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) distinguishes himself from his lumbering zombie brethren by demonstrating unusual proficiencies in tool use, problem-solving, strategic leadership, and empathic
understanding. In fact, as Big Daddy comes to occupy an increasingly central
position in the film, he displays a sense of social justice so compelling that his
surface attributes as monster fade while his sympathetic qualities as underclass revolutionary grow.18
I choose the term underclass deliberately, for Romeros dark world in
Land of the Dead is an America whose class divisions mirror our own in their
harsh, often race-bound demarcations. At the top is Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), the rich, white overlord of a high-rise compound called Fiddlers
Green where the wealthy can live in hermetically sealed luxury apart from
the apocalyptic world below. The middle class includes people who work for
Kaufman or subsist on the scraps he tosses, a mixed bag of soldiers, servants,
and poor citizens from a variety of ethnic backgrounds that eke out an existence below Fiddlers Green. The middle class is protected from zombie
encroachment by natural and military barriers, but they cannot hope to rise to
the class status of Fiddlers Green residents. Of course, this means that the
underclass is a mass of zombies, whom even most of the middle class refuse to
recognize as anything more than dangerous animals. Yes, the zombies present a real threat to the living, but dont the living also threaten the zombies?
Do the zombies possess a right to exist as well, especially as they seem to
assume increasingly human traits? Big Daddy certainly seems to think so,
and his leadership of his undead comrades helps convince viewers of the
same. When he sets his sights on nothing less than Fiddlers Green itself as
the proper inheritance of the zombies, it is difficult not to root for the revolution that will shatter this corrupt and suffocatingly privileged space, even if
it means that those we call the living must die in the process.
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FIGURE

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1. Big Daddy in Land of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2005, Universal

Pictures).

In one of the climactic acts of the zombie siege on Fiddlers Green, Big
Daddy corners a fleeing Kaufman in his getaway car. With Kaufman protected
behind locked doors, Big Daddy reaches for a nearby gasoline hose and pierces
the cars windshield with its nozzle, sending a stream of gasoline pouring inside
(fig. 1). Big Daddy then walks away, leaving the underground garage. Kaufman,
more irritated than mystified by Big Daddys behavior, steps out of the car and
removes the spewing gasoline hose, tossing it on the ground carelessly. As he
tends to the duffel bags packed with cash he has brought with him, he is
threatened by the entrance of Cholo (John Leguizamo), a Latino soldier for
hire whose dreams of upward mobility have been crushed by Kaufman. The
two fire weapons at each other, Cholo missing his target and Kaufman hitting
his. So Kaufman is surprised when, shortly afterwards, Cholo rises to menace
him once again. But of course Cholo is not dead, but undead. As the two
struggle, Big Daddy returns to the garage with an explosive canister that he
rolls toward Kaufmans car and the pool of gasoline that has collected around
it. The ensuing blast sends Cholo flying away from the car while Kaufman is
apparently immolated, his flaming dollar bills sailing in the air like confetti as
the car burns and Big Daddy looks on.
This scene is a striking example of how Romero interweaves commentary
on class inequities with imagery tied to the contemporary trauma of the Iraq
War. Romero has often said that Land of the Dead is his attempt to explore the
post-9/11 American mentality, and that Kaufmans administration of Fiddlers
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Green could be seen as analogous to the presidential administration of

George W. Bush.19 Romero sees Kaufmans establishment of a society that
refuses to reckon with the true nature of the zombie crisis as mirroring the
Bush administrations posture toward terrorism, where the problem is functionally ignored through what Romero calls living around it, and profiting
from it.20 In this particular sequence, Kaufman must face what he has
denied in the forms of Cholo and Big Daddy.
Cholo, who has been used by Kaufman for dangerous military missions
that serve his own ends but whom Kaufman refuses to recognize as an equal,
embodies the tragic position of rank and file American soldiers in Iraq. Like
Cholo, these soldiers are often nonwhite and working class. They fight and
die for an authority that disrespects them through dishonest arguments concerning the reasons for their sacrifices. But in this scene, Kaufman must
reckon with the fact that he has effectively condemned Cholo to deathand
that this death is not the end in terms of Kaufmans responsibility.
When Big Daddy penetrates the faade of Kaufmans insulated world
with the gasoline hose nozzle, the gesture carries much symbolic weight. At
the level of commentary on the Iraq War, the gesture evokes the popular
antiwar slogan of no blood for oil as well as the economic reality that the
war abroad helped send gas prices soaring at home, resulting in particular
hardship for the working class. In terms of class commentary, the gesture
asserts Big Daddys pride in his profession (he remembers what a gasoline
hose can do) as well as his defiant determination to stick it to Kaufman in a
manner that not only makes concrete the very working-class labor that Kaufman strives to ignore but also reminds him that this labor is capable of turning the exploitation that his wealth rests upon against him.
There is also a provocative intertextual dimension to Big Daddys gesture, one that becomes clearer when Big Daddy returns to the garage with
the explosive canister that he uses to detonate Kaufmans car. This automobile explosion beside a gasoline pump in Land of the Dead echoes a similar
moment in Night of the Living Dead, when three members of a besieged farmhouse group attempt to escape the surrounding zombies by filling a truck
with gas at a nearby pump (fig. 2). The escape attempt goes awry and two of
the three are burned to death when spilled gas catches fire and the truck
explodes. Only Ben (Duane Jones), the black leader of the farmhouse group,
survives this incident.
The similarities between these charged moments in Night of the Living
Dead and Land of the Dead, joined together across nearly four decades, invite
us to consider the matter of cinematic deferred action. If Land of the Dead
encourages allegorical connections with the Iraq War, then this framework
for historical allegory must be understood through Night of the Living Deads
relation to the Vietnam War. Night of the Living Deads status as an allegorical
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2. Ben in Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968, Image Ten).

commentary on America eating itself alive through the contemporary trauma

of Vietnam and resistance to the civil rights movementan interpretation
articulated persuasively by critics within two years of the films original
releasehas only grown more established in the years that have followed.21
But if Land of the Deads relation to Iraq must then be filtered through Night
of the Living Deads relation to Vietnam, then how is historical trauma revised
and retranscribed in the process?
Let me reply to this question first by turning to one of Freuds own examples of traumatic memory and deferred action. In Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Freud describes the case of Emma, a woman who suffers
from a hysterical compulsion that prevents her from entering a shop alone.
Freud traces this compulsion to two linked memories that only become fully
comprehensible as traumatic through their deferred distribution across several different temporalities. The more recent memory comes from Emmas
experience as a twelve-year-old: she fled a shop after seeing two male clerks
laughing together. She believed they were laughing at her clothes, and she
recalls that one of the clerks struck her as sexually attractive. The older, more
buried memory comes from Emmas experience as an eight-year-old: her
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genitals were fondled through her clothes by a shopkeeper who grinned at

her during the assault. The trauma of this original memory could not be
assimilated at the time because of Emmas sexual naivet, so the trauma was
deferred through the temporalities of Emma as a twelve-year-old and Emma
as an adult in analysis. Associations between the two memories are conveyed
through the shared characteristics of clothing, laughter, shop workers, and
sexual feeling; these associations across several different temporalities combine to produce the compulsion that prevents Emma from being able to
enter shops alone as an adult. Freud concludes, Here we have the case of a
memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an experience,
because in the meantime the change [brought about] in puberty had made
possible a different understanding of what was remembered.22
Land of the Dead also presents a case where viewers are challenged to
arrive at a different understanding of what was remembered about Night of
the Living Dead, to bring the historical trauma of Iraq and Vietnam together.
Just as Emmas memories are joined through deferred action and the associative glue of certain shared elements, so too are the similar sequences I
have presented from Romeros two films. Both films feature black men as
the survivors of, and witnesses to, a deadly automobile explosion caused by
fire igniting spilled gasscenes of destruction that evoke and connect the
military violence of wars waged outside America with the social and economic violence within America. Such violence must be endured especially
by disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities and the poor. In Night of
the Living Dead, Ben looks on in horror as two of his comrades are killed in
the flames; in Land of the Dead, Big Daddy watches Kaufmans demise with the
grim satisfaction of a mission accomplished. In both cases, the audience is
meant to identify with the affective position of the black charactera daring
venture in 1968, and still daring in 2005.
With Ben, Romero asks the audience to empathize with a powerful black
male leadan exceedingly rare figure in commercial American cinema of
the time (and still far too unusual today). With Big Daddy, Romero demands
an even more uncommon point of empathyBig Daddy is not just black, he
is undead. In Night of the Living Dead, Bens humanity is asserted by contrasting him with the inhuman zombies that he battles, as well as the despicable
white father Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) who repeatedly attempts to
undermine his authority. Land of the Dead revises this affective map for the
spectator by suggesting that humanity is not just a matter of putting aside
racial differences in the confrontation with the inhuman, but that this very
distinction between human and inhuman can be transformed into one
more layer of racial and economic discrimination turned to the advantage of
those with wealth and power. Romero retranscribes Ben as Big Daddy in
order to re-remember Night of the Living Dead, to revisit the original films
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vision of historical trauma with the benefit of experience gained in the

interimexperience that includes the Iraq War.
Again, I do not wish to suggest that Romeros films, or our memories of
those films, are somehow equivalent to Emmas traumatic memories. Diagnosing films or spectators as if they were patients in therapy is a pursuit
doomed to distort the very different ways that clinical and cinematic meaning gets made. Instead, I want to hold open the possibility that there is something to be learned from the structural affinities between the deferred nature
of personal trauma in Emmas memories and historical trauma in Romeros
films. In short, the processes of psychological retranscription described by
Freud offer a valuable framework for interpreting the historical deferrals across
Romeros films without becoming themselves clinical instances of Freuds
Nachtrglichkeit.
One effect of Romeros deferred presentation of historical trauma across
these two films is to heighten the stakes of what audiences are willing to
incorporate as their own when confronted with those forces conventionally
designated as other.23 How far are you willing to go for the cause of social
justice when its enemies mutate and reorganize? Can you empathize across
lines of race, class, and even those divisions that separate the living from
the dead? And is empathy enough? These questions form one major challenge that viewers of Romeros films encounter. Another is the refusal to
allow spectators to rest comfortably with any nostalgic imagination of the
1960s, or Night of the Living Dead itself, as a utopian moment in progressive
political activism immune to critique. The fact that Dennis Hopper, a countercultural icon of the 1960s for his role in Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper,
1969), appears in Land of the Dead as Kaufman speaks cynical volumes about
how counterculture becomes dominant capitalist culture.24
But there is also a less cynical, even cautiously optimistic aspect to Land of
the Deads revisions of Night of the Living Dead on historical trauma. Night of the
Living Dead ends on a devastating, nihilistic note when Ben survives the zombie onslaught only to be killed by his rescuers when they mistake him for one
of the undead. In the films closing images, Ben again faces gasoline and
flames, only this time he is just one more anonymous corpse added to a bonfire of lifeless bodies. Land of the Dead concludes with Big Daddy caught in the
gun sights of a retreating truckload of the living as they abandon Fiddlers
Green to the conquering zombie masses. It seems as if Big Daddy, like Ben
before him, must die as the price of embodying the demands for social
change he represents. But then, at the last minute, the leader of the living
spares Big Daddy, explaining that he and his kind are just looking for a place
to go, same as us. This simple but powerful statement of recognition, same
as us, is the closest Romero comes to believing in something resembling the
healing potential of Freuds talking cure for trauma. That this healing can
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only exist, in the end, through a series of deferred actions means that any
glimmer of hope must be located within cyclical histories of pain.
A New (Re)Vision: Diary of the Dead
When Land of the Dead retranscribes Night of the Living Dead by
concluding with Big Daddys survival rather than Bens murder, does Big
Daddys status as something to be frightened of disappear? After all, doesnt
Big Daddys survival, his provisional fulfillment of viewer hopes so cruelly
dashed when Ben dies, consolidate his identity as protagonist rather than
monster? In other words, are we frightened (if at all) by the same things in
Night of the Living Dead as in Land of the Dead? Romeros most recent contribution to the series, Diary of the Dead, offers a useful vantage point on these
questions.
Diary of the Dead, perhaps even more than Land of the Dead, encourages
viewers to perform the work of retranscription. While all of the previous
Living Dead sequels proceeded chronologically, depicting the zombie
plague at increasingly advanced stages (but always with a different set of
characters), Diary of the Dead returns to the temporal frame of Night of the Living Dead. The zombie plague has just arrivedwe return to where we began
forty years before.
Of course, it is fair to ask whether most viewers will remember or have
even seen a film released four decades earlier. Some doubtlessly will not. But
several factors suggest that many viewers will indeed be ready to retranscribe
Diary of the Dead alongside the previous Living Dead films. First, the nature
of horror film fandom in general often inspires unusually loyal, informed
devotion to the genre and sometimes extends to forms of identification with
horror-oriented subcultural communities (such as goths).25 Second, the
status of the Living Dead films as cult cinema, a specialized set of films
spread across a wide variety of genres that for any number of reasons (oddness, originality, shock value, unheralded excellence, sublime awfulness, particular kinds of cultural or historical significance) encourages repeated
viewings, revival screenings, and avid word-of-mouth sometimes bordering
on worship long after the date of original release.26 Third, the popularity of
prerecorded entertainment technologies for the home, from VCRs in the
1970s to todays high-definition DVD players and Internet-based distribution
hubs, means that the Living Dead films (like thousands of others) are
more accessible to a wider audience than ever before.27 The flipside of this
accessibility is invisibility, with the deluge of film titles easily available potentially drowning each other out. But it is precisely those films like the Living
Dead series, with strong name recognition and a pronounced cultural presence grounded in deep, sustained appreciation among critics and fans alike,
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that stand to thrive in this media-saturated landscape. One obvious sign of

the success of Romeros films in this regard is the virtual army of remakes,
imitations, offshoots, homages, and parodies that range across decades,
nations, and media as varied as cinema, television, novels, comic books,
video games, music videos, and Web shorts.
So when Diary of the Dead returns to the temporal frame of Night of the
Living Dead, there are compelling reasons to believe that many viewers will
respond to this turning back of the narrative clock as an even more emphatic
invitation to participate in the work of retranscription I have described in
Land of the Dead. Diary of the Dead follows a University of Pittsburgh film crew
(a band of students accompanied by an alcoholic emeritus professor who is
also a war veteran) as they drive across the wide state of Pennsylvania, from
Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, looking for refuge from the zombie plague. The
crews director, Jason Creed (Joshua Close), insists on chronicling their
odyssey on digital video cameras every step of the way. His girlfriend, Debra
(Michelle Morgan), voices the most heartfelt opposition to Jasons fixation
on filming rather than simply surviving under such deadly circumstances,
but it is she who finally completes the editing of Jasons footage into a documentary called The Death of Death. It is this documentary that comprises the
entirety of Diary of the Deadevery scene we watch is drawn from the footage
Jasons crew shoots, or from the material they access via television and the
Internet.
The temporal structure of Diary of the Dead mirrors other recent films I
will refer to as camera confessionals, such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel
Myrick and Eduardo Snchez, 1999) and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008). We
know from the outset that the events depicted through the simulation of
raw, first-person footage have already taken place, that the visual record created by these characters remains even if the characters themselves may have
died in the interim between their filming and our viewing. The difference in
Diary of the Dead is that the context provided by the Living Dead series
affords a remarkably rich opportunity to embed the camera confessional format with issues of retranscription. For example, Diary of the Dead ends with a
harrowing scene that Jason has downloaded from the Internet, filmed in the
style of a YouTube Web short. In other words, the scene is a brief, user-generated document incorporated into the longer camera confessional that is
Jason Creeds The Death of Death, which in turn doubles as Romeros featurelength fiction film Diary of the Dead. The scene shows a group of redneck
hunters shooting at tied and bound zombies for target practice, for fun.
They string up a female zombie by her hair to a high tree branch and then
blast away her body with their guns, leaving only her eyes and forehead
swinging from the tree. She stares back at the camera, at us, a trickle of
blood running like a tear from her left eye (fig. 3).
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3. The conclusion of Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2008, Artfire

Films).

At one level, this shot of the mutilated female zombie functions very
much as an attraction in Gunnings sense. The confrontational address of
the audience, the direct look at the camera that acknowledges the spectator,
the shocking image of an execution, the emphasis on pure display rather
than narrative developmentall are markers of a cinema of attractions.
Even Debras voice-over that accompanies this image works similarly to the
showman or magician often present either within the early films analyzed by
Gunning or outside them, as speakers in the tradition of carnival barkers
who drew attention to the spectacle by performing the important temporal
role of announcing the event to come, focusing not only the attention but
the anticipation of the audience. Debras voice fulfills this announcing gesture by explaining the source of the spectacle we are about to witness, as
well as how what we will see was deliberately staged by the hunters.28 She sets
us up for the attraction itself.
In other ways, this spectacle of the mutilated zombie operates somewhat
differently than an attraction. Debras voice extends the confrontational
address of the attraction by speaking to us directly over the grisly final shot:
Are we worth saving? You tell me. But her voice is a far more developed narrative presence than are those of the magicians and barkers of early cinema.
In addition to being a central protagonist, she has contributed voice-over narration from the very beginning of the film; by the films end, we know that
even if authorship of The Death of Death is attributed to Jason, it could not have
been completed without Debras editingJason himself dies before he can
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finish this task. So Debra, as editor and narrator, shapes The Death of Death (as
Romero shapes Diary of the Dead) into a narrative film, rather than a disjunctive series of attractions.
But it is not only Debras editing and narration that transform the temporality of this final scene in Diary of the Dead into something other than the
temporality Gunning assigns to the attraction. For Gunning, the attractions
temporality is limited to the pure present tense of its appearance, where a
now you see it, now you dont temporal frame departs from narrative temporalitys movement from now to then, with causality as a frequent means of
vectorizing temporal progression.29 The unmistakable visual markers of
lynching in this scenethe hanging from the tree, the redneck hunters, the
execution staged as entertainment not only for the hunters themselves but
for audiences imagined by the camera operator, the distribution of this
lynching via the Internet mimicking earlier distribution of lynching photographs as postcardscollide with retranscription to generate the now is
then temporality of the allegorical moment, where historical trauma infiltrates the shocking spectacle and confrontational viewer address of the
attraction.30 Even though Diary of the Deads lynching features a white female
zombie, there is a powerful invitation to retranscribe her as analogous to
Ben, the black man lynched (at least figuratively) at the conclusion of Night
of the Living Dead. Bens body, like that of the female zombie, is destroyed
and humiliated by a redneck posse that assumes he is inhuman. Where the
female zombie hangs from a tree, Bens corpse is dragged by meat-hooks
and ultimately consumed in a bonfirein both cases, the visual iconography
of lynching overwhelms the images. Through retranscription linked across
films, coupled with the invocation of traumatic events linked across history,
the pure present tense of the attraction metamorphoses into the past as
present tense of the allegorical moment.
When past and present meet in the final scene of Diary of the Dead, the
connotations attached to lynching radiate not only toward slavery and the
civil rights struggle, but also toward the disastrously racialized mismanagement of Hurricane Katrinas aftermath in 2005 (footage of which appears
earlier in Diary of the Dead) and a number of humiliations connected to the
Iraq War. The torture of the female zombie by a band of smiling rednecks
eager to post their handiwork on the Internet evokes the photographs that
exposed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal (April 2004) as well as the widely
publicized mutilation, burning, and hanging of bodies belonging to American contractors by Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah (March 2004). At Abu
Ghraib, American forces humiliated Iraqis with the same gleeful, grinning
pride that often appears in the faces of observers in lynching photographs. In
Fallujah, Iraqi insurgents engaged in a practice called saleh in Iraqi Arabic,
which translates roughly as the lethal public humiliation of an enemy; at
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least one journalist described saleh as the act of lynching.31 When the
echoes of these humiliations of Iraqis by Americans and Americans by Iraqis
join together with the shame of Hurricane Katrina and a long history of
racist violence in America epitomized by lynching, what does this allegorical
moment that concludes Diary of the Dead become? How do spectators interpret it? What are they afraid of?
The allegorical moment, like any theorized act of spectatorship, can only
represent a horizon of possibilities for potential viewer reactions. No physiological sensors or strategic interviews or questionnaire results can ever tell the
whole story about a matter as complicated and idiosyncratic as how exactly
spectators interact with a film. This is not to say that such approaches are incapable of providing valuable information about certain aspects of the spectatorship experience. Indeed, the increasing interest in cognitivism in film studies
over the past twenty years constitutes a contemporaneous and often strikingly
different theoretical model to the cinema of attractions.32 Where the former
concentrates on rather basic, empirically observed viewer processes connected
to deciphering a narrative or registering an emotion, the latter focuses on
more hypothetical, less easily quantified dimensions of spectatorship attached
to historical and philosophical concepts such as modernity.33
Cognitivist studies of the horror film in particular have tended to suggest
universalist, often ahistorical explanations for what motivates viewer responses
of fear and/or horror. For example, Joanne Cantor and Mary Beth Olivers
claim that fright reactions to horror films can be accounted for largely (at
least among younger viewers) through theories of stimulus generalization,
where stimuli and events that cause fear in the real world will produce a
fear response when they appear in movies, so that natural fears of actual
distortions and deformities will be replicated in viewer responses to similar
sights in horror films.34 Or Nol Carrolls claim that horror film monsters
frighten us through their impurity, their anthropologically defined status as
categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless.35 For Carroll, zombies inspire fear due to their interstitial nature as both
living and dead. But what of the empathic viewer responses to Big Daddy in
Land of the Dead and the lynched female zombie in Diary of the Dead that I have
suggested in conjunction with notions of the allegorical moment and retranscription? Cognitive fears of impurity or deformity, bound so tightly to an
assumed equivalence between how we process a film and how we process the
real world, do not adequately account for the spectatorship possibilities I
have outlined: empathy mixed with fear, visceral sensation mixed with historical consciousness.
Robin Woods influential psychoanalytic/Marxist account of the horror
film seems more in line with my concerns than the cognitivist model, at least
at first glance. Wood distills the basic structure of the horror film into the
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formula normality is threatened by the Monster, where normality stands for

conformity to the dominant social norms of heterosexual, bourgeois, patriarchal capitalism, and the Monster stands for all that our civilization represses
or oppresses in the shape of othered groups such as women, homosexuals,
the working class, foreign cultures, and nonwhite races.36 The strength of
Woods model is that it allows the horror film to be read in social terms, but
its weakness is the rigidity with which the social realm and its cinematic representation are imagined. For Wood, progressive or radical horror films
introduce ambivalence to normalitys relationship with the Monster. Normality undergoes critique as the Monster receives sympathy, or else normalitys
dominant ideology is apocalyptically negated through the recognition of
that ideologys disintegration, its untenability, as all it has repressed explodes
and blows it apart.37 In the reactionary horror film, by contrast, normalitys
ideology becomes consolidated through treatment of the Monster with
unmitigated horror, sexual disgust, and unremitting ugliness and crudity.38 Even though Romeros Living Dead films have always held pride of
place for Wood as unusually well-realized fulfillments of the genres progressive potential, Woods model is finally too inflexible, moralistic, and narrativedriven to accommodate the full range of complexities attached to an allegorical
moment such as the conclusion of Diary of the Dead. Indeed, Wood confesses
to bewilderment when faced with this scene, even if he finds the film as a
whole to be the work of a great and audacious filmmaker that confirms
Romero as the most radical of all horror directors.39
What confuses Wood about the ending of Diary of the Dead are precisely
those qualities that pertain to its nature as an attraction. He recognizes the
power of its shocking display of spectacle (its central image is certainly
among the most appalling ever produced within fictional cinema), but he
cannot fathom its apparent disconnection from narrative priorities (the perpetrators of the desecration it depicts are a couple of irrelevant rednecks who
played no part in the film).40 What escapes Wood, here and elsewhere, is the
possibility of cinematic significance in registers other than those dominated
by narrative. Note, for example, how Woods judgments of progressive and
reactionary often lean heavily on narrative analysis for their primary criteria, highlighting especially the narrative endpoints of the films (the happy
ending, [when it exists] typically signifying the restoration of repression).41
Gunning, as we have seen, points out how the attraction indicates a
mode of viewer address that does not necessarily coincide with and may
sometimes even oppose conventional narrative development. One way to
interpret the final scene of Diary of the Dead is to read it as a variation on the
attraction Gunning calls the apotheosis ending. In the apotheosis ending,
which entered cinema from the spectacle theater and pantomime, the film
closes with a sort of grand finale in which principal members of the cast
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reappear and strike poses in a timeless allegorical space that sums up the
action of the piece.42 The conclusion of Diary of the Dead does not reintroduce the principal cast as in the original apotheosis endings of early cinema,
but it does provide a spectacular finale that condenses the film into one summarizing image. This image may not make sense as narrative, but it makes
profound sense as an attraction. It pulls together the confrontational elements aimed at viewers throughout the film and throughout the Living
Dead series as a whole. Its evocation and/or retranscription of Iraq, Katrina,
Vietnam, civil rights, and slavery characterize its space as allegorical but not
timeless. Its temporality depends on the attractions spectacular now you
see it, now you dont time of display, but it cannot be limited to the pure
present tense Gunning assigns to the cinema of attractions.43 Instead, this
attraction exists in the past as present tense of the allegorical moment,
where historical trauma informs the confrontation delivered by sensational
spectacle. This is not to say that Gunnings account of an attractions temporality excludes the possibility of historical reference, for his notion of timeless
allegorical space is clearly conditioned, like my own, by Walter Benjamins
notion of allegory as a radical disruption of conventional historical continuity.44 What I am calling attention to here is an important difference in emphasis, rather than disagreementwhere Gunning highlights the attractions
allegorical space, I am highlighting its allegorical time.
Given my focus on retranscription, perhaps it is more accurate to
describe the allegorical moments temporality in terms of pasts as present
tense. The plural pasts remind us of the multiple points of contact offered
to the spectator between a film and history, as well as between a series of
films and histories. By the same logic, the quality of fear provoked by the
allegorical moment necessarily encompasses a wide range of possible affect,
including (but not limited to) horror, dread, disgust, and anxiety. In fact,
this fearful affect may be inseparable from an even more expansive variety of
feelings such as empathy, anger, amusement, and admiration. In other
words, the allegorical moment demands an approach to fear in film that
matches its approach to history in film: attentive to plural, multilayered
interactions between spectator and cinema that span cognition and sensation, knowledge and affect, past and present.45
For example, viewers may respond to the final scene in Diary of the Dead by
experiencing a mixture of sense and sensation that could produce very different answers to Debras question, Are we worth saving? Sadness and outrage
inspired by how history repeats itself, how the lessons of one lynching and one
war fail to prevent the occurrence of others, may leave some viewers fearful of
a future or a present where something like this female zombies victimization
could happen to them. Other viewers may see the rednecks as a throwback to
the posse that kills Ben in Night of the Living Dead, making these rednecks
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closer to a kind of memorial for fears lodged in the past than to an active
source of fear in the present. Still others may feel relief that the fearful threat
of the zombies (Iraqi insurgents? American contractors? Vietcong? U.S. soldiers? Blacks? Whites?) can be controlled, even mocked, by human forces
however temporarily. These examples are meant to be not an exhaustive
catalog of possible spectator responses, but a preliminary list that suggests how
the allegorical moment might function. However speculative and incomplete,
I hope it is enough to convey how formulations concerning the horror films
production of fear through stimulus generalization, cognitive categorizations
of impurity, or diagnoses of progressive and reactionary political representation cannot fully explain fears complexity in the allegorical moment.
Fear in the allegorical moment, when it is filtered through its similarities
to and differences from a cinema of attractions, also makes room for viewer
responses to films governed by what Gunning calls an aesthetic of astonishment. When Gunning theorizes how early cinema spectators may have
responded to the cinema of attractions, he describes an attitude in which
astonishment and knowledge perform a vertiginous dance, and pleasure
derives from the energy released by the play between the shock caused by this
illusion of danger and delight in its pure illusion. The jolt experienced
becomes a shock of recognition. Far from fulfilling a dream of total replication of reality . . . the experience of the first projections exposes the hollow
center of the cinematic illusion.46 In the case of Diary of the Deads conclusion,
then, an astonished spectator might cringe with fear or disgust at the sight of
the mutilated female zombie but simultaneously admire the skillful combination of digital and prosthetic special effects that made this image possible. The
point is that viewer responses of fear and knowledge are not mutually exclusive, whether the knowledge stems from awareness of cinematic artifice as in
Gunnings aesthetic of astonishment, or from awareness of historical trauma
as in the allegorical moment. Neither, then, are viewer responses of fear and
pleasure mutually exclusive. The allegorical moment insists that traumatic history can be felt as well as knownand that this knowledge can arrive as a shocking confrontation and/or as a playful encounter with cinematic illusions.
Playful, pleasure, and illusion need not signal triviality. As Gunning
notes, one of the most sophisticated observers of early cinema, the Russian
writer and intellectual Maxim Gorky, was already attuned to the double-edged
nature of cinemas ability to communicate visceral threat alongside empty illusions.47 Gorky, writing about his attendance at a projection of Lumire films at
the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair in 1896, registers both sensational astonishment
(the extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I
doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances) and knowing disillusionment (this mute, gray life finally begins to disturb and depress you).48 Gorky
also experiences fear. When faced with The Arrival of a Train, he begins by
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highlighting its terrifying threat: It speeds straight at youwatch out! It

seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you
into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing
into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full of
women, wine, music and vice. Yet Gorky concludes by highlighting the emptiness of this threat, his knowledge that the train is illusory: But this, too, is but
a train of shadows.49 His visceral terror and demystifying knowledge exist side
by side, without one canceling the other.
In a certain sense, Gorky sees cinema as an encounter with the living dead.
His fear emanates from recognizing terrifying life in images freighted with the
hollowness of death: From it there blows upon you something that is cold,
something too unlike a living thing.50 For Gorky, cinemas simultaneous fullness and emptiness are as inextricable as they are frightening. The images
carry a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are
forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim . . . But suddenly, alongside you, a gay
chatter and a provoking laughter of a woman is heard . . . 51 In Gorkys experience of cinema, we see the living dead projected and may even become
dead to our immediate surroundings before being jolted back to life. The
cinematic experience is death in life, life in death, a procession of living dead
images: Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is
soundless, although you see the muscles contracting in their gray faces. Before
you life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of
colorsthe gray, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.52 One century
later, Romeros films testify to how cinema can still provoke the fear and the
fascination of seeing and being the living dead. And in a cinema of the living
dead, films fearful attractions partake of history with a timely belatedness.

Notes

This essay is a slightly revised version of my contribution to the Fear: Multidisciplinary Perspectives workshop sponsored by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center
for Historical Studies, Princeton University, in April 2008. I wish to thank Jan
Plamper and Benjamin Lazier, the workshop organizers, for inviting me, and
the workshop participants for contributing such thought-provoking discussion.
I am grateful also for the earlier opportunities to present some of this material
at conferences held at Florida State University and the University of Florida.
Special thanks to Tom Gunning, who graciously commented on this essay and
helped me to improve it; of course, I do not wish to imply that he would necessarily agree with all of my claims.

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1. Tom Gunning, An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed. (New York, 2004), 863. For a different
account of this history that places more emphasis on the possibility of actually
panicking viewers, see Stephen Bottomore, The Panicking Audience? Early
Cinema and the Train Effect, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television
19, no. 2 (1999): 177216.
2. For a useful sampling of these alternative approaches to theorizing film spectatorship, see Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New
Brunswick, NJ, 1995).
3. On the influence of the cinema of attractions concept, see Wanda Strauven,
ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam, 2006). This volume includes
a detailed account from Gunning concerning the conceptual genesis of the
cinema of attractions and how he developed the term through collaborations
and conversations with a number of scholars, especially Andr Gaudreault. See
Tom Gunnings chapter in this volume, Attractions: How They Came into the
World, 3139.
4. Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the
Avant-Garde, in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative
(London, 1990), 5859.
5. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, 1985). The critical debates surrounding the concept of classical Hollywood style (along with
related notions such as preclassical, postclassical, and nonclassical) have been
vigorous and long-lasting. See, for example, Jane Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood
Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham, NC, 1992); Steve Neale and Murray
Smith, eds., Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London, 1998); and David Bordwell,
The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley, 2006).
6. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. (New
York, 2008), 9496.
7. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 3.
8. In this spirit, some scholars have argued against the assumption that classical
Hollywood style adheres more closely to norms grounded in realist conventions rather than excessive, melodramatic ones. See, for example, Rick Altman,
Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today, in Gaines, Classical Hollywood Narrative, 947; Linda Williams, Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, Film
Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 213; and Linda Williams, Melodrama
Revised, in Nick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (Berkeley, 1998), 4288.
9. Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions, 57.
10. Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema,
and the Modern Horror Film (New York, 2005), 2.
11. For my divergence from Gunning on this score and related discussion, see
ibid., 4647.
12. For a brief summary of the origins and influence of the series, as well as an
argument for Night of the Living Dead as one of the most important American
films ever produced independently, see Adam Lowenstein, Night of the Living
Dead, in John White and Sabine Haenni, eds., Fifty Key American Films (London,
2009), 14247.

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13. I do not make this turn to Freud casually or mechanically, but with the conviction that his work continues to provide a valuable stimulus for certain kinds of
research in both the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in relation
to trauma studies. For an eloquent recent statement (and enactment) of this
position, see E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in
Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005), esp. 2441.
14. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; reprint, New York, 1973), 111.
15. See Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, December 6, 1896; quoted in
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 112.
16. Ibid.
17. See Janet Walker, The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and the Postmodern
History Film, in E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, eds., Trauma and Cinema: CrossCultural Explorations (Hong Kong, 2004), 12344.
18. It is important to note that Big Daddy is never shown participating in the most
monstrous aspect of zombie behavior: eating the flesh of the living.
19. See, for example, Romeros comments in the documentary Undead Again:
The Making of Land of the Dead, Land of the Dead DVD (Universal, 2005).
20. George A. Romero, quoted in Michael Rowe, Land of the Dead: Home of the
Grave, Fangoria 244 (June 2005): 97.
21. See Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 15364. See also Sumiko Higashi,
Night of the Living Dead: A Horror Film About the Horrors of the Vietnam Era,
in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam
War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), 17588; and Ben Hervey,
Night of the Living Dead (London, 2008).
22. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology, in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(London, 1957), 1:356. As an editorial footnote points out, this early account
of prepubescent sexuality would itself be revised by Freud soon afterwards with
his discovery of infantile sexuality (356 n.1).
23. Of course, this retranscription may also be understood as channeled through
Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Deadboth of these sequels, it should be noted,
also include central black male characters. For a related analysis that focuses
particularly on issues of gender in Romeros zombie films and their revision in
the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead (written by Romero, directed by
Tom Savini), see Barry Keith Grant, Taking Back the Night of the Living Dead:
George Romero, Feminism, and the Horror Film, in Barry Keith Grant, ed.,
The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin, 1996), 200212.
24. In the documentary Undead Again, Romero speaks about how he and Dennis
Hopper connected immediately as guys who were disappointed that the 60s
didnt work out the way we expected they would. When Hopper offered to play
Kaufman like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Romero responded,
Thats exactly where Im going with this; this is the Bush administration.
25. On horror fandom, see Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror (London, 2005). On
goth subculture, see Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby, eds., Goth:
Undead Subculture (Durham, NC, 2007). The prominence of Romeros name in
advertising for all of the Living Dead sequels indicates an expectation of
auteurist recognition and series knowledge among viewers.

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26. On cult films, see Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lzaro Reboll, Julian Stringer, and
Andy Willis, eds., Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste
(Manchester, 2003); J. P. Telotte, ed., The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason
(Austin, 1991); J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New
York, 1983); and Danny Peary, Cult Movies (New York, 1981).
27. For a study of the implications of cinema as a home viewing experience, see
Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home
(Berkeley, 2006).
28. Tom Gunning, Now You See It, Now You Dont: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions, Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 7.
29. Ibid., 7, 11.
30. For examples of lynching photographs, see James Allen, ed., Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM, 2000).
31. Nir Rosen, FallujahInside the Iraqi Resistance: Part 1, Losing It, Asia Times,
July 15, 2004 (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FG16Aa02.html;
accessed March 15, 2008).
32. For important examples of cognitivist research in film studies, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI, 1985); and Carl Plantinga and
Greg M. Smith, eds., Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore,
MD, 1999). For a polemical argument in support of cognitivism as a superior
alternative to film theory of the 1970s and 1980s dominated by psychoanalytic
and Marxist approaches, see David Bordwell and Nol Carroll, eds., Post-Theory:
Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, WI, 1996). For a valuable compendium of
1970s and 1980s film theory, see Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York, 1986). On psychoanalytic approaches to
the horror film, see Steven Jay Schneider, ed., Horror Film and Psychoanalysis:
Freuds Worst Nightmare (Cambridge, 2004); and Carol J. Clover, Men, Women,
and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, 1992).
33. These differences in theoretical stance have fueled an ongoing critical debate
in film studies around the so-called modernity thesis. For accounts of this
debate, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and
Its Contexts (New York, 2001), esp. 1735, 10130; and Adam Lowenstein, Cinema, Benjamin, and the Allegorical Representation of September 11, Critical
Quarterly 45, nos. 12 (Spring/Summer 2003): 7384. One particularly significant branch of the modernity thesis involves a redefinition of classical Hollywood style as vernacular modernism. See, for example, Miriam Bratu Hansen,
The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema and Vernacular Modernism, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies
(London, 2000), 33250.
34. Joanne Cantor and Mary Beth Oliver, Developmental Differences in Responses
to Horror, in Stephen Prince, ed., The Horror Film (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004),
22526. See also James B. Weaver III and Ron Tamborini, eds., Horror Films: Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions (Mahwah, NJ, 1996).
35. Nol Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London, 1990),
32. For complications and extensions of Carrolls argument, see David J. Russell,
Monster Roundup: Reintegrating the Horror Genre, in Browne, Refiguring
American Film Genres, 23354; and Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw, eds.,
Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (Lanham, MD, 2003).

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36. Robin Wood, An Introduction to the American Horror Film, in Barry Keith
Grant and Christopher Sharrett, eds., Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film,
rev. ed. (Lanham, MD, 2004), 117, 113, 11113.
37. Ibid., 119, 134.
38. Ibid., 135, 136.
39. Robin Wood, Fresh Meat, Film Comment 44, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 31,
29. For Wood on Romeros first three Living Dead films, see his Hollywood from
Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York, 2003), 63119, 28794. For arguments that complicate Woods claims, see Murray Smith, A(moral) Monstrosity,
in Michael Grant, ed., The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg (Westport, CT, 2000), 6983; Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 15464; and Adam
Lowenstein, A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film, in Cindy Lucia,
Roy Grundmann, and Arthur Simon, eds., The Blackwell History of American Film
(Oxford, forthcoming).
40. Wood, Fresh Meat, 31.
41. Wood, An Introduction, 113.
42. Gunning, Now You See It, Now You Dont, 10.
43. Ibid., 11, 7.
44. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(1928; reprint, London, 1996).
45. In this sense, my formulation of the allegorical moment challenges more narrowly focused attempts to isolate certain spectator reactions to horror films as if
feelings of fear and horror, for example, can be definitively specified and
separated. See Steven Jay Schneider, Toward an Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror, in Prince, The Horror Film, 13149.
46. Gunning, An Aesthetic of Astonishment, 876.
47. See ibid., 86276; and Tom Gunning, Animated Pictures: Tales of Cinemas
Forgotten Future, After 100 Years of Films, in Gledhill and Williams, Reinventing Film Studies, 31631.
48. Maxim Gorky, review of Lumire program, Nizhegorodski listok, July 4, 1896;
reprinted (trans. Leda Swan) in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and
Soviet Film (New York, 1973), 407, 408. See also Gorkys related review from the
same year reprinted as Gorky on the Films, 1896, trans. Leonard Mins, in
Herbert Kline, ed., New Theatre and Film 1934 to 1937: An Anthology (San Diego,
1985), 22731. For related context and discussion, see Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (London, 1994).
49. Gorky, review of Lumire, 408.
50. Gorky, Gorky on the Films, 1896, 228.
51. Gorky, review of Lumire, 408.
52. Ibid., 407.

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